The traditional way users access a web page on the WWW (World Wide Web) is by typing the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the web page in the web browser or by clicking the hypertext link of the corresponding web page in the web browser. The URL or the hypertext link is resolved into its corresponding IP (Internet Protocol) address. A HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) request is made to the web server operating at the corresponding IP address. The web browser waits for the contents of the web page to be downloaded from the web server and displays the contents of the web page successively following the download. If the contents of the web page are resident in the web browser cache, the contents are retrieved immediately from the cache resulting in an instantaneous display of the web page.
Several advancements have been made to web browsers to speed up the display of the content of web pages by means of pre-fetching web links. Pre-fetching static links from web pages is a mechanism that exploits the idle time of web browsers to download the content of web pages having higher probability of being visited by the user in the future. Conventionally, text content of a web page is downloaded to the web browser's cache in order to pre-fetch the web page. Whenever the link corresponding to the cached web page is visited by the user, the web browser accesses the server to download non-text items like images of the requested web page. Further, the cached text items of the revisited web page are retrieved from the web browser's cache resulting in the display of the requested web page. Alternatively, the entire content of a requested web page that includes both text and non-text items can be downloaded from the web server to the web browser's cache. This results in increased network traffic and larger cache memory occupation.
There exist several methods for pre-fetching the content of a web page to a web browser's cache. In an existing method, a constant number of links in a web page are selected keeping in view the available bandwidth. A proposed solution for selecting specific links for pre-fetching is to scan a user's recently visited web sites or the browsing history and discover a generalized topic from the content of the visited web pages. The generalized topic can be used to look for topics within the links available in a web page for pre-fetching. However, scanning the user's browsing history to discover a common topic necessitates the requirement of more time and resources. Moreover, the user has no part to play while the contents of the requested web page are being fetched by the browser and has to remain idle until the entire web page is displayed. Furthermore, the user has no knowledge of when the web page will be displayed and cannot interact with the web page immediately when a request is made, by clicking on the concerned link.